The exotic beauty of Rubinstein was one of Cléopâtre's surprises.
Ida Rubinstein was, by Russian standards, hardly trained as a dancer
at all. Fokine had begun to give her private lessons in 1907 and
continued in 1908 in Switzerland. He wrote about that period in
which she wanted to be prepared to appear in Oscar Wilde's Salome:"The work on the Salome dance was unique in my life. I had
to teach Rubinstein simultaneously the art of the dance and to
create for her the Dance of Salome. Before this, she had studied
very little, and showed very little progress in it. Her energy and
endurance were of great assistance, as was her appearance...She was
tall, thin and beautiful." (26) Bakst and Fokine nevertheless
succeeded in persuading Diaghilev that this rich, orphaned, exotic
Jewess should play the title role in Cléopâtre.Fokine was
not being inconsistent because even in St. Petersburg he had felt
that it would be preferable to give Cléopâtre's role "to a
dramatic actress rather than to a ballet dancer." (27) We are
told that Fokine composed Rubinstein's movements so that they would
reveal her beauty without making her dance. (28) The result was a
triumph. Paris adored her. Count Robert de Montesquiou came to each
of her performances. (29) A critic raved, "Elle a la souplesse
du serpent et la plasticité de la femme; ses danses offrent la grâce
voluptueuse et stéréotypée de l'Orient, grâce pleine de
mollesse et de la pudeur d'une passion impulsive." (30)

Ida Rubinstein as Cleopatra was brought on to the stage on a
palanquin, swathed like a mummy in veils. Benois described the
climax of her part in the ballet:

The Egyptian Queen...in the person of the daring young Ida
Rubinstein gradually discarded all her veils and gave herself
up to the ecstasy of love before the eyes of the whole audience.
Only at the most critical moment the helpful court ladies - whom we had known in St. Petersburg-surrounded the couch with curtains,
and by so doing they really emphasized the point...the
disrobing took place to the beautiful but terrifying music of Mlada.
Slowly, in accordance with the complicated court ritual,
one by one, the covers were unwound, disclosing the divine
body,
omnipotent in its beauty. At the end of the ceremony, when the
slight figure emerged covered only by the wonderful transparent
garment invented by Bakst, one experienced a feeling of awe. Here
was not a pretty artiste appearing in frank déshabille, but
a real, fatal enchantress, in the tradition of the cruel and
grasping Astarte. (31)

Cléopâtre and its acclaim must have been almost irresistible to
the thirty-two-year-old Dutch painter, Kees van Dongen, who had been
living in Paris for ten years. (32) He adored dancing and even
watching others dance; (33) he loved the theatrical, from the
extremes of Egyptian belly dancers (34) to the heavy-weight champion
of the world. (35) He was attracted by the exoticism of Africa
although it would be 1910-11 before he went to Morocco for the first
time and 1913 before he reached Egypt. He is quoted as saying some
time later, presumably about 1925, "oui, j'aime ce qui
brille, les pierres précieuses qui étincellent, les étoffes qui
chatoient, les belles femmes qui inspirent le désir charnel...et la
peinture me donne la possession plus complète de tout cela, car ce
que je peins est souvent la réalisation obsédante d'un rêve ou
d'une hantise..." (36) In addition he idolized the fashionable;
and Cléopâtre, even aside from the people who attended it,
was the essence of chic. Van Dongen painted it as a member of an
enraptured audience; there is no indication I can discover anywhere
that he was part of the Diaghilev coterie.

Although Van Dongen knew Picasso and Braque and had lived in the
Bateau Lavoir at the time of the famous banquet for the Douanier
Rousseau, his work was the antithesis of cubism which was born
there. It was with the abandon and colour of an artist who had
exhibited in the 1905 Salon d'Automne and had been christened with
his friends Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck, a Fauve, and who had
exhibited with the Brücke in Germany in 1908, that Van Dongen
approached Cléopâtre.While the Cubists were disciplining
the visible world into angular planes which denied the organic and
the voluptuous, Van Dongen was taking the sensual lines of the
female body, intensifying their effect by stylization and pulling
them together into a sweeping composition which evokes the abandon
of the dance. Whereas Cubist colour was becoming increasingly stark
and monochromatic Van Dongen was enjoying the excitement of dabbing
a vivid green on Cleopatra's flesh, surrounding Tahor's body with
lines of the henna of her hair and using a vivid vermilion to
suggest the veils and movements of Tahor's dance, all against a
deep blue ground. Finally Van Dongen responded to the sensuality of Cléopâtre
and emphasized it, particularly in the thrust of Ida
Rubinstein's reclining nude body as the dancer in the title role.
The colour and the rhythm heighten the picture's erotic
effect.

Although we are told that "un coup d'oeil lui suffit pour
prendre, dans un sujet, ce qu'il lui faut et pour éliminer ce qui
ne lui est pas nécessaire," (37) and that.' Van Dongen
travaille surtout par nostalgie," (38) it is unlikely that he
waited Jong after the performance of Cléopâtre before
producing his version of it. There is every reason to believe,
therefore, that the date, 1909, on the back of the painting (fig. 2)
is correct. This precision in dating is rare in Van Dongen's work
which has not as yet been studied systematically and in detail. For
example, a famous nude called Anita in his own collection was
dated (presumably by him) 1905-6 when he lent it to Brussels in
1958. (39) On the other hand when it was lent to the retrospective
exhibition of his work in Paris in 1967 it was dated 1910. (40)
Ottawa's painting may be helpful, therefore, in dating Van Dongen's
work; it makes it apparent, for example, that a Femme nue
couchée,
which is very close to Ida Rubinstein as Cleopatra and which was
lent to the Paris reprospective exhibition from the J. B. collection
in Marseilles, must be 1908 rather than about 1905 as it was listed
in the catalogue. (41) In it, as in our painting, there is some
evidence of a memory of Matisse's Blue Nude of 1907.

Van Dongen's approach was arbitrary rather than descriptive,
probably genuinely a recollection of the dance as the title he
inscribed on the reverse of the canvas, Souvenir de la Saison
d'Opéra Russe,suggests. It does seem to convey, however, the
essence of that sensational ballet. Pavlova is pathetic with her
fragile arms stretched imploringly upward, her body stained the
brown of the slave. Rubinstein on the other hand is indifferent to
anything but her own sensuality, isolated on her lustrous white
couch. Abbreviated, calligraphic, arbitrary, this painting still
extracts the sensuality and Duncan-like freedom of movement of this
historic ballet in which Pavlova and Rubinstein danced competitively
for Diaghilev and the audience at the Théâtre du Châtelet.